A Psychological Perspective On The Refugee Crisis

It is clear that any mass migration movement will have pros and cons, and the problems it can pose will rarely have a perfect and unique solution. From a psychological point of view, the refugee crisis can be explained in terms of the cognitive biases that are related to the creation of political-social thought.

When biases come into play, we can come to think in a very specific and polarized way, coming to believe that our opinions are the only correct ones.  Biases can be useful to the extent that we are not prepared to process all the information that comes to us through the senses. These biases help us stay in our mental comfort zone believing that social reality is closer to what we think than to what our ideological opponents think.

The limitations of our immediate memory, the lack of information or the uncertainty about the consequences of our actions cause people to systematically resort to heuristics or mental shortcuts. We use these shortcuts to simplify troubleshooting, leading  us to perform evaluations based on incomplete and partial data.

Why is it so difficult for us to accept the opinion of the other?

To understand the refugee crisis we have to analyze the position of all the parties involved .  For this it is necessary to understand how the human mind works in the formation of thoughts. I invite you to reflect on a fact:  in the formation of our opinions there are facts mixed with cognitive errors that condition our perception of reality (past, present and future).

Objectively, eliminating thinking errors when processing information, all conflict arises because there are one or more opposing positions. The cons of immigration can be found in the identification problems of people who arrive en masse or through mafia trafficking ,  and in the labor problems that they may encounter when changing countries . 

The pros are found in the thousands of people who will escape poverty and armed conflict in their country, thus saving their lives and that of their families. In addition to improving their quality of life, thousands of people have escaped poverty or overcome famine thanks to immigration.

Social problems appear when in human conflicts we only choose and process the information that conforms to our expectations,  almost without caring if it is reality or a lie. Social reality has as many prisms as it looks, and our errors in processing information on certain occasions only allow us to see one of the prisms, generating strong and vehement opinions.

In the refugee conflict, where are the people left?

We came to believe, thanks to confirmation and self-justification biases, that the only way to observe and solve a conflict has to start from our perception of it, which we always believe is true to reality. But we are only victims of these thinking errors, which are produced by our brain to simplify the solution of problems.

We all sometimes make mistakes when processing information, what  ‘s more, this article is written under one of them. In order not to disturb my deepest beliefs, in order not to abandon my ideas about humanity, I show my utmost faith in the human being, undoubtedly skewed by the confirmation heuristic.

It does not matter the content of the idea, the goodness or badness of the intentions or the worthy politician. The moment any of these mental contents is isolated from any kind of reasonable doubt, we will be getting dangerously close to fundamentalism.

In reference to the conflict of Syrian refugees,  when I manage to get rid of my thinking biases, I understand people who, out of fear or personal situations, are against  a massive entry of people into their country. I understand the fear that they may have that, alongside thousands of innocent people, others who want to end the democracy that it has cost us so much blood to get in the West will also move. I understand your objections to culture shock and the consequences it may have.

But above all, and due in part to my information processing biases, I am closer to people who help other people whether or not they are wrong in their thinking. In political, ideological or religious conflicts, anything can count, but when we talk about people I think we would have to approach it from a humanitarian perspective.